This is huge and well worth reading… titled “The Destruction of Economic Fact”, this article is about how financial rules have been changed to circumnavigate the truth in order to gain short term profit. The end result is not just uncertainty, but an erosion of stability that previously attracted so much worldwide investment into the US economy.

Money quote:

…businesses are left to figure out reality on the basis of connections, influence, and private information. Just like we do in developing and former communist countries.

Good stuff shedding light on liberal advocates pushing lenders to make bad loans, then decrying efforts by those banks to turn bad money into good, and all while proudly twisting the truth in an Oscar winning movie.

Yup – sounds like a liberal.

The meltdown was not caused by the bankers who mislabeled their risky debt; the economy would have collapsed no matter who was holding the bag when it all went sour. The only crime committed by the villains depicted in Inside Job was to make sure they weren’t personally liable when all those bad investments went kablooey.

And I like this description of big business… because this is what a large company that’s trying to attract investors is SUPPOSED to be like:

It’s clever to stir up populist outrage against the fatcats who tried to enrich themselves when everyone else went broke. Who doesn’t hate devious fatcats? Even I hate them. But in this case I know that they didn’t cause the recession: they merely tried to profit from it. Because that’s what fatcats do: They try to profit from anything, in any financial climate. That’s what makes them fatcats.

And finally the bit about fooling a TV audience that’s more interested in entertainment than politics… but maybe took the bait as well:

But most Americans will never know any of this. Inside Job dominates the headlines, and the thesis it puts forth is the accepted wisdom of an angry nation. Only the few of you reading this essay, plus a handful of researchers and analysts, are aware that there’s a different side to the story. I concede my likely defeat in this particular battle from the War of Ideas. But all I can do is call it like I see it, a tiny voice in a hurricane of disinformation blowing in the other direction.

So you’re a Greek citizen working for the government and you see everyone making a fuss about having to bail out your country… and also see your salary decreased along with reductions in your retirement package.

And the proper reaction is to hit the streets and riot… so how’s that gonna fix the problem?

Key issues according to the above article:

The problems that brought Greece to the edge of this precipice are not new. The country’s culture of corruption and nepotism, its bloated state and its faulty statistics are the work of decades.